Does anyone else feel like this entire post and most of the comments are coming straight from a Monsanto bot/shill factory?
Don’t we already have enough real shit to worry about tho?
Yeah, except the vast majority of seeds are infertile, meaning they can’t be replanted, means the “good ol boys” can’t survive.
Where the fuck do people come up with this shit?
No the “vast majority” of crops are not infertile. They are hybrids. Farmers buy the seeds because of a genetic phenomenon called heterosis AKA hybrid vigor. It takes expertise and a shit ton of money to make hybrid seed. If growers could get the same performance from saving their own seeds only an absolute dumbfuck would buy seeds from a seed company.
Now there are a few species that hybrids can only be made by taking advantage of mutants that have male sterility genes. The resulting hybrids are still fertile (produce viable female gametes) but need an outside source of pollen. Examples: onions, sunflowers and carrots.
The only “sterile” seed sold is seedless watermelon aka triploid seed. Seedless watermelons are only sold because the market demands it thanks to a push by the USDA after being created in Japan pre-WW2. The margins on seedless watermelon seed are often 40-50% less than hybrid diploid seed. And don’t get me started on the research cost - 14-15 generations for a new female line versus 7-8 for seeded types.
Most hybrids do not produce fertile seeds. You can test it out if you want but it doesn’t work. I used to work for a seed company. Beyond that, without fertilizer the soil itself is dead in the vast majority of farming land.
I have planted seeds from round up ready soy beans. They grew just fine for my needs, which wasn’t farming. Farmers have also planted harvested hybrid seeds, Monsanto sues the ones they catch, because it’s a contract violation for those that bought seeds.
Source that research was banned since the 90s? All I’m aware of is that they aren’t available commercially and sale and field testing of terminator seeds has been banned since the 00s.
Yeah they weren’t banned in the 90s. They were developed in the mid 90s with a patent filed in 1998. The UN Convention on Biological Diversity adopted a moratorium in 2000, recommending that governments block field testing and commercial use of terminator seeds, but didn’t yet ban research. In 2006 they expanded the moratorium, explicitly prohibiting field trials and emphasizing risks to biodiversity and farmers rights.
They’re not sterile, but they will sue you if they find you’ve been growing seeds from last year’s crops.
Or if your neighbours crops have germinated in your lands
I don’t think they’ve successfully sued anyone for that. The few cases I saw last time I looked people were intentionally germinating or saving/selling seeds.
So uhh… hypothetically if one were to live next to a cornfield and acquire some seeds from said field cough somehow cough, would those purely hypothetical seeds grown in one’s garden then constitute corn piracy?
Asking for a friend of course.
It would constitute theft.
You wouldn’t download a corn would you?
Saving seed for the farms own use is expressly allowed under plant variety protection and patent laws in the U.S.
This is why the seed companies created contracts that they require all growers to sign before being allowed to purchase GMO crops. The prohibition from saving seed is from the signed agreement not from the patent or PVP.
Say if you got grain from the farmer for your bird feeder. Then if you happen to use the grain as seed to plant some for next year’s bird feeder — completely legal. You are not bound by the agreement between the farmer/seed company. Unless you try to sell the grain/seed to another person. Then you are in violation of the seed companies patent in the U.S.
Remember that corn shows a severe amount of inbreeding depression. So the F2 plant will not produce as much as the farmers F1 did the year before.
That is a reason why most farmers like to purchase seeds every season anyways. It’s way more predictable and you may want to change the strain depending on many variables.
Farming, especially commodity crops like wheat, is an extremely risky business. Taking out some risk is often worth it.
Modern farming is way more complicated and scientific than most people realize. The portrayal of farmers as bumbling idiots in popular media is not helping.
Why invent technology to control people when you can just use the law?
or if/when your neighbors pollen blows onto your crops and you grow from those seeds, and then they sue you for being a pirate of their IP
No they won’t.
They will sue you if you take your neighbors pesticide resistant seeds, sow them, douse them in pesticide so only the resistant ones survive, and sow your entire field with them.
Yes, they will.
You’re taking the approach of an independent farmer that didn’t sign a contract with Monsanto. What you said mostly aligns with that scenario.
For the farmer that did sign a contract with Monsanto, that is a standard and required clause, and they do enforce it.
Classic piracy. The original product is still there; you’re just making a copy.
Isn’t classic piracy boarding ships and taking all their shit at gunpoint?
I mean, I totally agree with all forms of breaking IP law on ethical grounds. But I also recognise that it’s still breaking the law right now.
Why “but”? Why are those two statements viewed as contradicting each other in tone?
You getting downvoted for stating what’s factually correct while still disagreeing with it is classic shooting the messenger.
The messenger is getting shot for not bringing receipts. I was about to shoot them too, then I retrieved a receipt: https://geneticliteracyproject.org/2024/01/05/dissecting-claims-about-monsanto-suing-farmers-for-accidentally-planting-patented-seeds/
You should be allowed to do that.
I agree, but you aren’t. I think all IP law is stupid, but until i’m president of the universe, it’s still the law.
Finally. FINALLY. My ulcer grows every time I hear someone quote that list of evil things Monsanto does. Even though yes, they are evil.
Monsanto doesn’t even exist anymore. It was bought out by the totally not evil company Bayer a while back.
Of course Bayer has suffered quite a bit of indigestion over gobling up that morsel over the years.
Yea, they’re evil enough with the pesticides, and the hostile takeover of farms. We don’t need to make the genetic engineering they’re doing, which is actually good work, to also be thrown under the bus
I would agree if they didn’t use their non-sterile plants to take over small farms around their huge ones by suing for theft when farmers used part of the previous crop that had been pollinated with the Monsanto GM pollen. They didn’t buy that genome so it was stolen… Fucking wankers.
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Isn’t one argument against GMO that they could spread and outcompete other crops? In that case a terminator gene would even be a good thing?
That’s exactly why the original terminator gene was a joint USDA-ARS /delta-pine effort. The USDA-ARS was looking for ways to prevent GMO species from escaping and causing issues.
You know the shit that actually happened. For example -
Creeping Bentgrass
https://www.opb.org/news/article/gmo-grass-oregon-creeping-bent-scotts-monsanto/
Wheat -
https://www.nature.com/articles/499262a
Corn/teosinte
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0167880918301075
This sounds like the back of a Crichton novel, and I want to read it
Also, most farmers use hybrid crops, which you already can’t save, because they’re hybrids. (You can save them, but they’re not going to produce the same plants you get them from).
Whether a plant species is hybridized has little effect on whether it grows true from seed or only via cuttings.
Wild maple trees for example do not grow true from seed.
Apples are a prime example.
Wild maple trees for example do not grow true from seed.
How do they reproduce?
Sexual reproduction via flowers+seeds.
When self-fertilizing, the offspring are not identical.
Oh OK, that makes sense - you’re talking about clones right? I thought you were saying that they don’t even come out the same species 🤣
Companies DO irradiate non organic ginger though, sterilizing it, before shipping it to stores.
This hard, sugarless, unripe tomato sure is red though
At this point, I barely even buy tomatoes to put into food anymore. If mom’s been growing them in her greenhouse any given year, I’ll eat a few off the vine. The stuff in stores? Ehh, it barely has flavour.
What about seedless watermelon
That’s treated with a chemical to keep it from making seeds.
Not even close.
Seedless watermelons are a triploid. These are hybrid between a tetraploid female and a diplod male. The plant has three copies of every chromosome and is unable to produce fertile gametes aka completely sterile.
Fruit formation is triggered by fertile diploid pollen (planted in the field In a 4:1 ratio). The fruit then continues to grow without embryo formation in the fruit seeds (pips).
So, the same applies to seedless grapes?
They’re often treated with hormones.
I sort of misspoke with regard to watermelons -
Seedless watermelons are created by crossing a regular watermelon with 22 chromosomes with one that’s been chemically treated to have 44 chromosomes. The resulting hybrid has 33 chromosomes, making it sterile and seedless.
This is a bit misleading. You only need to treat the first generation of 2n watermelon with colchicine (which inhibits the movement of chromosomes during metaphase) to produce a 4n watermelon. Once you have a 4n watermelon, subsequent generations do not require colchicine treatment.
Ah, OK. That makes sense. Thank you.
Not the person you replied to but thanks. Doesn’t that contradict the meme ?
Seriously? I assumed sterile hybrid
Unfortunately terminator seeds very much are a thing North America.
Fortunately what you linked says nothing of the sort. You are in this meme
I’m not a native English speaker but that sounds like it’s talking about the potential harms of such terminator seeds and not saying they’re in the market as of now.
That entire page says “this would be a bad thing to exist”. But it doesn’t. There are no commercial terminator seeds.
Well, it says “this would be a bad thing to sell,” my read is that it exists and Monsanto owns the IP.
I’d say “that’s the point” if this was put out by modern media…both sides are doing this to build engagement and support. That is, writing about something, but hiding the fact that it’s nothing. They take a small fact that on its own is true…but is really quite unimportant to the larger question. They then build up on that one small fact and make it out to be a smoking gun.
They may even leave out completely relevant facts. Like in this article it says “Monsanto pledged to not commercialize the seed,” but doesn’t mention the UN COP8 moratorium on them.
But the other thing is…op posted this from a college website, possibly because they think it’s an academic paper…but it’s not. It’s a summary of case studies in from their CONS200 “Foundations of conservation” program.
